Library Sees Resignations Following Bullet-Riddled Books; Flathead Beacon, August 29, 2022

MICAH DREW, Flathead Beacon; Library Sees Resignations Following Bullet-Riddled Books

"Two ImagineIF library advisors have resigned from their posts due to perceived threats to their safety after several bullet-riddled books were dropped off at the library earlier this month. A third advisor who had previously planned to retire this year, also mentioned safety concerns upon leaving. 

On Aug. 3, library staff in Kalispell found five books left in the overnight drop box that appeared to have been shot with a firearm. All library branches closed for the day while law enforcement investigated. They determined it was an isolated incident and there was no threat to staff or the public. 

Two days later, two more books were found with bullets lodged in them. Library staff say that similar markings on the books indicated they were likely from the same person. 

While director Ashley Cummins said law enforcement still did not feel there was any threat to the community, members of the library staff opted to leave their positions. 

“They said they did not feel safe coming to work anymore,” Cummins said. “They signed up to be library workers, they didn’t sign up for that.”

Two additional staff members have expressed desires to resign as well, but Cummins said so far that has not happened. Instead, the director is working to reassure the staff with new safety precautions including the installation of security cameras around each library branch and new mandatory monthly safety trainings."

Open data needs ethical, efficient management; University of Cape Town News, March 6, 2019

Helen Swingler, University of Cape Town News; Open data needs ethical, efficient management

"Ethics in data management

Niklas Zimmer, manager of digital services at UCT Libraries, said that ethical management of data is key. Several of the lightning presentations made at the event underscored this.

UCT Gender Health and Justice Research Unit (GHJRU) research officer Kristen Daskilewicz cited an important example when she said the use of open data is not always appropriate for research where there are heightened safety concerns.

Her example described a collaborative two-year cross-sectional research project on LGBTI health, safety and other rights that the unit undertook on behalf of the Southern and Eastern Africa Research Collective on Health (SEARCH). SEARCH is a collective of 23 civil society organisations in nine countries.

The project participants had to be “very careful” with data collection and dissemination in the study countries, particularly those where aspects of same-sex relationships have been criminalised. There were concerns about protecting the survey participants and the unit’s civil society partners, who were the data collectors."

Computer science faces an ethics crisis. The Cambridge Analytica scandal proves it.; Boston Globe, March 22, 2018

Yonatan Zunger, Boston Globe; 

Computer science faces an ethics crisis. The Cambridge Analytica scandal proves it.

"Software engineers continue to treat safety and ethics as specialities, rather than the foundations of all design; young engineers believe they just need to learn to code, change the world, disrupt something. Business leaders focus on getting a product out fast, confident that they will not be held to account if that product fails catastrophically. Simultaneously imagining their products as changing the world and not being important enough to require safety precautions, they behave like kids in a shop full of loaded AK-47’s...

Underpinning all of these need to be systems for deciding on what computer science ethics should be, and how they should be enforced. These will need to be built by a consensus among the stakeholders in the field, from industry, to academia, to capital, and most importantly, among the engineers and the public, who are ultimately most affected. It must be done with particular attention to diversity of representation. In computer science, more than any other field, system failures tend to affect people in different social contexts (race, gender, class, geography, disability) differently. Familiarity with the details of real life in these different contexts is required to prevent disaster...

What stands between these is attention to the core questions of engineering: to what uses might a system be put? How might it fail? And how will it behave when it does? Computer science must step up to the bar set by its sister fields, before its own bridge collapse — or worse, its own Hiroshima."